Hamilton Points to Floor as Culprit for Mercedes’ Struggles in Sao Paulo

Lewis Hamilton indicated that the Mercedes W14 chassis’s floor played a central role in his disappointing performance during the Sao Paulo Grand Prix at Autódromo José Carlos Pace.

Despite beginning the race from the fifth position on the grid and swiftly overtaking both Aston Martin cars, Hamilton grappled with a lack of pace, leading to a gradual descent in the rankings, ultimately concluding the race in eighth place.

This marked a stark contrast to the team’s recent strong showing in Mexico, making the underwhelming performance all the more disheartening. The Mercedes car struggled notably in straight-line speed, even with the activation of the DRS system.

“My guess is that the floor is not working,” Hamilton speculated in the paddock after the end of the race. “The floor is not sucking it down so that pushed us to go to a higher wing, and then we’re just massively draggy on the straights.

“We’re losing so much time on the straights, there’s nothing I can do about it,” he complained. “Then we’re just sliding through the corners, so we have to look into why that is the case on this rough circuit.”

In addition to the issues with straight-line speed, Hamilton attributed the problems to “overheating tires” and “a lack of grip in the corners.”

Hamilton’s difficulties were not confined to the main race day; they also manifested during Saturday’s Sprint race. Even his impressive start that allowed him to pass both Aston Martins into turn 1 did little to boost his confidence that the situation had improved come Sunday.

“Nothing changed in the car from yesterday to today so I knew it’d be a tough one,” he said. “Yesterday I just ate through the tyres with an unexpected lack of pace; I drove better today in terms of making my stints but we were just slow.

“I’m sure there’s something within the set-up that we might have been able to have done a bit better, but whether or not that would have put us further up, I can’t say.

“It’s a setback, but as a team we’ll just come together and we’ll try and push forward,” he insisted. “There’ll be a lot of analysis this week after today and I’m sure there’ll be things like ‘Ah maybe if we’ve done this, it would have been better’.”

“I still think that ultimately the car didn’t work here for some reason, and that is the way it is.”

Hamilton had also voiced concerns about his left-front tire displaying unusual behavior at the onset of his second stint. He noted, “It was really odd. The car started veering to the right while I was trying to steer left.”

“I wondered if the tyre maybe hadn’t been done up or something” he added. But it was fine in the end. I think it must have been just a gust of wind.”

Hamilton did manage to complete the race and secure some valuable points, in contrast to his teammate George Russell, who was compelled to retire due to a severe oil temperature problem.

“We obviously got something very wrong this weekend,” he said. “We’re not sure what that was yet, but the pace just hasn’t been there. You clearly don’t go from a podium-worthy car [last week] to one that is a second off the front.

“It’s been very strange. We thought yesterday may have been a one-off, but it clearly wasn’t. We were sliding the tyres and I think the performance we showed was the maximum we had with the car the way it was.

“In the end we were suffering from high oil temperatures in the Power Unit and that caused us to retire. That topped off what was a difficult day.”

“We retired George as an issue on his cooling system was causing temperatures to slowly go out of control,” added Mercedes’ trackside racing engineer Andrew Shovlin. “Clearly we’ve got something very wrong with the setup.”